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Flood resilient communities

Floods can be devastating - communities world-wide face
challenges in dealing with them. UWE Bristol researchers
co-work with communities and agencies to transform thinking on
'preparedness' and adaptive resilience to floods/extreme
weather.

A growing issue

Climate change increases the frequency of weather extremes, and
is likely to lead to more floods and droughts for communities. At
the same time, policy and practice (in the UK and elsewhere) is
placing more responsibility for flood risk management on local
governments and the communities themselves. It's more important
than ever that residents are empowered to get more involved in
managing their own environment.
Professor Lindsey McEwen and
Associate Professor Jessica Lamond and their teams have been
working hard to understand already existing knowledge and skills
among different stakeholders, identify and remedy gaps in
communication and involvement, and share good practice locally and
nationally.

After the UK floods of 2014, and again in 2016, UWE Bristol
researchers shared their research into the costs and benefits of
property level protection and resilience. They provided advice to
affected households through flood recovery guidance and information
for insurers, loss adjusters and Local Authorities. Members of the
team were involved in directly assisting homeowners in accessing
grants to adapt their homes to limit future damage.

"It's all about resilience building," says Professor McEwen.
"There's plenty of evidence that people can be flooded several
times before they do anything to protect themselves. So we're
working with residents, businesses and local agencies to exchange
community knowledge in order to develop a collective capacity to
become more resilient."

Communicating flood memories

Raising collective awareness of flood risk and good ways to
reduce risk are critical pieces of the jigsaw, and that means
communication is key. The team are developing innovative methods to
connect residents and small businesses, town planners, designers,
and water management agencies, so that decision making is shared.
Using digital storytelling, community projects and the arts, their
research, co-produced with communities, aims to empower individuals
and groups to take action.

"Communicating scientific information is important," says
Associate Professor Lamond, "but we also need to recognise that
people are experts in their own lives. Managing flooding is about
everyone sharing their experiential knowledge and memories so that
we can find new solutions that are owned by communities."

For example, Professor McEwen's recent research, working with
communities and other stakeholders in flood risk management, has
highlighted the need to extend traditional models of information
transfer of 'expert scientific knowledge' from agencies to the
public. This is fostering a transformation of engagement practice
that values lay/local knowledges and intergenerational exchanges in
social learning about how to live with floods. The team has worked
with communities to build an archive of resilience stories that can
be shared online and face to face. It is now building a
toolkit to enable small businesses to access relevant peer to peer
resources based on narratives that capture different experiences of
adaptation.

Adapting the way we live with water is difficult, but the team
is hopeful that by working with and alongside communities in
exploring different ways to accept water in towns and cities and
prepare for flood risk, they can make a difference. So the
researchers at UWE Bristol are exploring the potential of changing
attitudes and behaviours through research funded by UK Research Council, National Science Foundation (US) and
others exploring what 'hydrocitizenship' could mean, and fostering
blue-green visions of the future in the UK and internationally.
These both seek to transform societies' relationships with
water.

The research suggests that taking a long term view helps to
ensure that urban adaptation is sustainable into the future. It
also highlights that raising the importance of flood and water
management in debate at local level, and embedding improved
understanding of natural processes in education, has the potential
to change attitudes and behaviour. Using these approaches improves
the lives of citizens in ways that go beyond the reduction of flood
risk.